WeRateDogs Act Report
Justin Edwards
WeRateDogs is the Twitter name of the user @dog_rates, real name Matt Nelson. It is an account that accepts user-submitted photos and videos of pet dogs, often with some information about the dogs themselves. WeRateDogs then tweets a short review of the dog with an arbitrary rating based on a ten-point scale. For comedic purposes, the account most frequently awards dogs with ratings above a ten on the ten-point scale, because as they once said to another Twitter user, "they're good dogs, Brent."
After gathering and cleaning the data from the WeRateDogs Twitter archive, I was able to perform an exploratory analysis and satisfy some curiosities I had about the dog data.
The first thing I checked out was the "stages" of the dogs that are included in the data set. In the reviews, WeRateDogs would often classify a dog based on the dog dictionary, or "The Dogtionary." As you can see, a pupper is a young puppy, a puppo is an older puppy, and a doggo is an adult dog. A floofer is a dog of any age that has lots of fur.
I was able to see that roughly two-thirds (67.3%) of the dogs in the data set are classified as puppers. The next most popular dog stage is doggo, making up 21% of the reviewed dogs. Puppos are less than 10% of the dogs, and fluffers are even farther behind at around 3%. I found these figures interesting because most dogs I see on social media would be classified as doggos, but puppers outnumber doggos by a considerable amount in this data set. Whether that is because WeRateDogs chooses to review mostly young puppies or whether it is because users tend to submit more puppies than adult dogs is unclear, however.
Interestingly enough, although puppers are the most reviewed classification of dogs, they have the lowest average rating! Puppos average the highest score of 12.0. Doggos and floofers are not far behind, however, each coming within 0.2 points of puppos. Puppers, however, average slightly below a score of 11.0.
I was then interested to find out what the most popular dog breeds are in the data set. I was able to see this via simple bar charts based on total number of reviews per dog breed, as well as total number of retweets and favorites (likes) each breed received.
The top four breeds are the same across all three charts, with Golden Retriever being by far the most popular. Labrador Retrievers, Pembrokes, and Chihuahuas round out the top four.
It is interesting to note that Toy Poodle is the sixth most reviewed dog breed but is in neither the top ten of the most retweeted nor the most favorited dog breeds.
Here are the dog breeds that can be found in each of the above top ten lists:
- Golden Retriever
- Labrador Retriever
- Pembroke
- Chihuahua
- Samoyed
- Chow
- Pug
For fun, I wanted to see pictures of the dogs from reviews with the highest total number of favorites. While all these reviews received over 100,000 favorites each, the top dog garnered 141,775 favorites! Here's the top five!
1.) Dogfish head
2.) Social justice barker
3.) Has relatives in Buckingham Palace
4.) A woofer twofer!
